Old Discourse on New Inequality – Andy Merrifield | Pluto Press

Had Rousseau still been around, maybe he’d have also played a cameo role in a new hit documentary, Inequality for All, directed by Jacob Kornbluth with economist Robert Reich as the unlikely lead. (Rousseau’s appearance would have only been cameo, of course, because later in life he avoided the limelight he’d courted earlier in life; and he was a reluctant public orator, despite being a dab hand at voicing inconvenient public truths.) Inequality for All follows Reich teaching his packed undergraduate class on Wealth and Poverty at UC Berkeley. In 1978, Reich says, your typical male worker doing just fine in the US was pulling in around $48,000 a year; your boss back then was probably making around $390,000. Thirty-odd years on, in 2010, the former struggles to earn $33,000 a year, while the latter’s average share has bloated to well over a million bucks a year.